Seminar Series

The Stephen. D Cutler Center for Investments and Finance sponsors the Seminar Speaker Series.

This series allows Babson’s finance faculty to build relationships in the academic community, to exchange research ideas with other top researchers from other institutions, to share academic research with the local practitioner community and to enhance Babson’s reputation as a research institution. Our top finance students are given a rare opportunity to be exposed to advanced academic research that is relevant and interesting. Some Babson students go on to pursue academic careers.

Finance Speaker Series Seminars

Speakers, papers, dates, times, and locations subject to change. Please email Assistant Professor Wanyi Wang for further information.

Upcoming Seminars, Fall 2025

TBA

​Past Seminars​

2024-2025 Academic Year

• Friday, April 18: Ran Duchin, Boston College, "Between Boardrooms and the Beltway: The Career Paths of Senior Regulators"
• Friday, April 25: Ishita Sen, Harvard Business School, "Climate Risk and the U.S. Insurance Gap: Measurement, Drivers and Implications"
• Friday, Mar 28: Vincent Bogousslavsky,Boston College, "An Anatomy of Retail Option Trading"
• Wednesday, Sep 11: Fabricius Somogyi, Northeastern University, “Monetary Policy Transmission through the Exchange Rate Factor Structure”
• Monday, Oct 28: Anya Mkrtchyan, University of Massachusetts, "Creativity Without Walls, The Case of Open Innovation"
• Wednesday, Nov 11: Felipe Severino, Dartmouth College, "Annuities and Endogenous Longevity"

2023-2024 Academic Year

• Elisabeth Kempf, Harvard Business School, "Corporate Actions as Moral Issues"
• Samuel Hartzmark, Boston College, "Counterproductive Sustainable Investing: The Impact Elasticity of Brown and Green Firms"

2022–2023 Academic Year

• Hui Chen, MIT, "Feedback and Contagion through Distressed Competition"
• Sasha Indarte, Wharton, "Bad News Bankers: Underwriter Reputation and Contagion in Pre-1914 Sovereign Debt Markets"
• Dragana  Cvijanovic, Cornell, "Opioid Crisis and Real Estate Prices"
• Victoria Ivashina, Harvard Business School,  “High-Yield Debt Covenants And Their Real Effects”
• Tarek Hassan, Boston University, "The Diffusion of Disruptive Technologies"
• Emil Verner, MIT, “The Debt-Inflation Channel of the German Hyperinflation"

2021–2022 Academic Year

• Lauren Cohen, Harvard, "The ESG-Innovation Disconnect: Evidence From Green Patenting"
• Leonard Kostovetsky, Boston College, "The Market for Fund Benchmarks: Evidence from ETFs"
• Charles Hadlock, Michigan State, "Protecting Your Friends: The Role of Connections in Division Manager Careers"
• Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Yale, "The Great Equalizer: Medicare and the Geography of Consumer Financial Strain"
• Rawley Heimer, Boston College, "Dynamic Inconsistency in Risky Choice: Evidence from the Lab and Field"
• Shai Bernstein, Harvard, "Do Startups Benefit from Their Investors’ Reputation? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment"
• Ebehi Iyoha, Harvard, "Home-Country Productivity Spillovers from US Multinational Activity"

2020–2021 Academic Year

• Christine Parlour, UC Berkeley: "Strategic Intermediation in Liquidity Market"
• Vyacheslav (Slava) Fos, Boston College: "Value Creation in Shareholder Activism: A Structural Approach"
• Hyunseob Kim, Cornell University: "Shareholder Power and the Decline of Labor"
• Tania Babina, Columbia University: "Artificial Intelligence, Firm Growth, and Industry Concentration"
• Richard Philip; University of Sydney: “The Conduits of Price Discovery: A Machine Learning Approach” 
• Thorsten Martin; Bocconi University: “Real Effects of Centralized Markets: Evidence from Steel Futures” 
• Manju Puri; Duke University: “Indirect Costs of Government Aid and Intermediary Supply Effects: Lessons From the Paycheck Protection Program” 
• Urban Jermann, University of Pennsylvania: "Non-Sovereign Stores of Value"

2019–2020 Academic Year

• John Hund; University of Georgia Terry College of Business:"The Needle and the Damage Done: Opioid Crisis Effects On Municipal Finance"
• Kumar Venkataraman; Southern Methodist University:"Institutional Order Handling and Broker-Affiliated Trading Venues"
• Tyler Shumway; University of Michigan Ross School of Business: "Are Monthly Market Returns Predictable?"
• Bernadette Minton; Ohio State Fisher College of Business: "Bank mergers and small business lending: Implications for community investment"
• Kent Daniel; Columbia University: "The Cross-Section of Risk and Returns”

2018–2019 Academic Year

• Xavier Giroud; Columbia Business School: “Firm’s Internal Networks and Local Economic Shocks”
• John Graham; Duke University Fuqua School of Business: "Executive Mobility in the United States, 1920 to 2011"
• Don Bowen; Virginia Tech Pamplin School of Business: “Technological Disruptiveness and the Evolution of IPOs and Sell-Outs”
• Amber Anand; Syracuse University Whitman School of Management: “Do buy-side institutions supply liquidity in bond markets? Evidence from mutual funds”

2017–2018 Academic Year

• Jonathan Brogaard; University of Washington Foster School of Business: “Price Discovery without Trading: Evidence from Limit Orders”
• David Thesmar; MIT: “New Experimental Evidence on Expectations Formation”
• Boris Vallee; Harvard Business School: “Can Financial Innovation Solve Household Reluctance to Take Risk?”
• Roni Michaely; Cornell: “Are U.S. Industries Becoming More Concentrated?”

2016–2017 Academic Year

• Gordon Phillips; Dartmouth: “The Impact of Consumer Credit Access on Employment, Earnings and Entrepreneurship”
• Phil Strahan; Boston College: “Funding Liquidity Without Bankers: Evidence From A Shock To The Cost Of Very Short-Term Debt”
• Kent Smetters; Wharton: “A General Sufficient Statistic for Expected Utility with Risk-Free and Risky Assets”
• Andrew Lo; MIT: “The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis: Reconciling Behavioral Finance with Efficient Markets”
• Marios Panayides; University of Pittsburgh: “Trading Fees and Intermarket competition”
• Anthony Cookson; University of Colorado: “A Text-Based Analysis of Corporate Innovation”
• Hoaxiang Zhu; MIT: “Size Discovery”

2015–2016 Academic Year

• Jordan Nickerson; Boston College: “Teachers Teaching Teachers: The Role of Networks on Financial Decisions”
• S. Abraham (Avri) Ravid; Yeshiva University: “Intellectual Property Contracts: Theory and Evidence from Screenplay Sales”
• David Denis; University of Pittsburg: “Unraveling the Mystery of Zero Leverage Firms”
• Stuart Gillan; University of Georgia: “Blocks In Stocks And Shocks To Blocks: Evidence From a Natural Experiment on The Impact of Blockholder Heterogeneity On Firm Value”
• Matthew Botsch; Bowdoin College: “Inflation Experiences and Contract Choice-Evidence from Residential Mortgages”
• Scott Yonker; Cornell University: “Trust Busting: The Effect of Fraud on Investor Behavior”
• Cal Muckley; University College Dublin: “Is Firm Level Clean Innovation Valued?”

2014–2015 Academic Year

• Jeff Harris; American University: “The Breakdown of the European Interbank Market during the Financial Crisis”
• Kristi Minnick; Bentley: “CEO Tournaments: A Cross-Country Analysis of Causes, Cultural Influences and Consequences”

2013–2014 Academic Year

• Pamela Moulton; Cornell: “Speculating on Private Information: Evidence from Trades around Analyst Recommendations”
• Simon Gervais; Duke University: “Transparency and Talent Allocation in Money Management”
• Nadia Massoud; York University/University of Melbourne: “Hedge Funds in M&A Deals: Is there Exploitation of Private Information?”
• Ronnie Sadka; Boston College: “Horizon Pricing”
• Mahendrarajah Nimalendran (“Nimal”); University of Florida: “Volatility and Directional Information-Based Trading in Options”

2012–2013 Academic Year

• Shane A. Corwin; University of Notre Dame: “The Changing Nature of Investment Banking Relationships”
• Babson hosted the 5th Boston Area Finance Symposium (BAFS)
• Isil Erel; Ohio State University: “Why Did Holdings of Highly-Rated Securitization Tranches Differ So Much Across Banks?”
• Victoria Ivashina; Harvard Business School: “Reaching For Yield In The Bond Market”
• Christopher G. Schwarz, a Babson alum (co-written with Mark Potter); University of California, Irvine: “SEC versus non-SEC Disclosed Portfolios: Revisiting the cost of Mandatory Mutual Fund Portfolio Disclosure”
• Philip Strahan; Boston College: “Financial Integration, Housing And Economic Volatility”
• Miriam Schwartz Ziv, Harvard/Hebrew U and Michael Weisbach; Ohio State: “What do Boards Really Do? Evidence from Minutes of Board Meeting”

2011–2012 Academic Year

• Bernadette Minton; Ohio State University: “Syndicated Loan Spreads and the Composition of the Syndicate”
• Jun Qian; Boston College: “Out of the Limelight but In Play: Trading and Liquidity of Media and off-media Stocks”
• Laurent Fresard; University of Maryland: “Learning from Peers’ Stock Prices and Corporate Investment”
• R. David McLean; MIT/Sloan/University of Alberta: “Does Academic Research Destroy Stock Return Predictability?”
• Eric Zitzewitz; Dartmouth College: “How Much Does Size Erode Mutual Fund Performance? A Regression Discontinuity Approach”
• Brian Rountree; Rice University: “Are individual investors influenced by the optimism and credibility of stock spam recommendations?”
• Sunil Wahal; Arizona State University: “Investing in a Global World”.

2010–2011 Academic Year

• Jeffrey Coles; Arizona State University: “The Joint Determinants of Managerial Ownership, Board Independence, and Firm Performance”
• Robert Battalio; Notre Dame: “Who, if Anyone, Reacts to Accrual Information?”
• Christian Lundblad; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: “Asset Fire Sales and Purchases and the International Transmission of Financial Shocks”
• Eric Jacquier; Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “The information content of realized volatility”
• Elvira Sojli and Wing Wah Tham; Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University (Netherlands): “Tapping Hidden Liquidity: Flash Orders at the NASDAQ”
• Daniel Bergstresser; Harvard Business School: “Financial guarantors and the 2007–2009 credit crisis”

2009–2010 Academic Year

• Niki Boyson; Northeastern: “Intense Hedge Fund Activists”
• Belen Villalonga; Harvard Business School: “The Role of Institutional development in the Prevalence and Value of Family Firms”

2008–2009 Academic Year

• Darren Kisgen; Boston College: “Do Regulations Based On Credit Ratings Affect A Firm’s Cost of Capital?”
• Paul Irvine; University of Georgia: “Performance of Institutional trading desks; An analysis of persistence in trading costs ”
• Larry Fauver; University of Tennessee: “Do IPO Earnings and Revenue Surprise Investors?”
• Ingrid Werner; Ohio State University: “When Constraints Bind”
• Marc Lipson; Darden University of Virginia: “What Explains the Asset Growth Effect in Stock Returns?”
• Jacob Oded; Boston University: “Not All Buybacks are Created Equal: The Case of Accelerated Stock Repurchases”
• Kartik Raman; Bentley College: “How does stock liquidity influence monitoring? Evidence from firms’ tradeoffs between market-based and debt-based monitoring”

2007–2008 Academic Year

• Neil Pearson; UIUC: “Does Option Trading Have a Pervasive Impact on Underlying Stock Prices?”
• Charles Jones; Columbia: “Does Algorithmic Trading Improve Liquidity?”
• Thomas Chemmanur, BC: “Heterogeneous Beliefs, Short Sale Constraints, and the Economic Role of the Underwriter in IPOs”
• Edie Hotchkiss; BC: “Do Buyouts (Still) Create Value?”
• Amy Edwards; SEC: “Short Selling in Initial Public Offerings”

2006–2007 Academic Year

• Will Goetzmann; Yale: “Lessons from Hedge Fund Registration”
• Jon Karpoff; University of Washington: “The Consequences to Managers for Cooking the Books”
• Bing Liang and Mila Getmansky Sherman; UMass Amherst: “Market Volatility, Investor Flows, and the Structure of Hedge Fund Markets”
• Jay Ritter; University of Florida: “Corporate Executive Bribery: An Empirical Analysis”
• Peter Tufano; HBS: “Live Prices and Stale Quantities: T+1 Accounting and Mutual Fund Mispricing”
• Maureen O’Hara; Cornell University: “Firm Characteristics and Informed Trading: Implications for Asset Pricing”
• David Brown; University of Wisconsin: “Idiosyncratic Volatility of Small Public Firms and Entrepreneurial Risk”
• Jennifer Conrad; UNC: “Skewness and the Bubble”

2005–2006 Academic Year

• Chester Spatt; SEC: “Equilibrium Asset Pricing and Portfolio Choice Under Asymmetric Information”
• Michael Roberts; The Wharton School: “Back to the Beginning: Persistence and the Cross-Section of Corporate Capital Structure”
• QJ Qian; Boston College: “Are Fairness Opinions Fair? The Case of Mergers and Acquisitions?”
• Reena Aggarwal; Georgetown University: “Did New Regulations Target the Relevant Corporate Governance Attributes?”
• Robert Hansen; Tulane University: “Investment Bank Governance”
• Anna Scherbina; Harvard University: “Inheriting Losers”
• Chris Leach; University of Colorado at Boulder: “Gas Pump Arbitrage”

2004–2005 Academic Year

• Ken Kavajecz; University of Wisconsin: “Price Discovery in the Treasury Futures Market”
• Stu Gillan; Arizona State University: “Explicit vs Implicit Contracts: Evidence from CEO Employment Contracts”
• Rohan Williamson; Georgetown University: “What is a Dollar Worth? The Market Value of Cash Holdings”
• Mike Barclay; University of Rochester: “Automation versus Intermediation: Evidence from Treasuries Going off the Run”
• Dan Bernhardt; Illinois/Rochester: “The Simple Analytics of Informed Finance”
• Mary Ellen Carter; Wharton: “The Role of Incentives and Accounting in the Design of Executive Compensation Packages”
• Leonce Bargeron; University of North Carolina: “A Theory of Shareholder Tender Agreements”
• George Aragon; Boston College: “Share Restrictions and Asset Pricing: Evidence from the Hedge Fund Industry”
• Gang Hu; Boston College: “The Profitability and Informativeness of Institutional Trading in IPOs”
• Kristina Minnick; University of Maryland: “Write-offs and Corporate Governance Leonardo Madureira, Wharton, Conflicts of Interest, Regulations, and Stock Recommendations”

2003–2004 Academic Year

• Robert Van Ness; Mississippi: “Locked and Crossed Markets on the NASDAQ and the NYSE”
• Raghu Rau; Purdue University: “Analyst Behavior at Independent Research Firms, Brokerage Houses, and Investment Banks: Conflicts of Interest or Better Information”
• Utpal Bhattacharya: “When No Law is Better than a Good Law”
• Karen Wruck; Ohio State: “Leverage, Asset Liquidity and Management Credibility: New Evidence on the Determinants on Corporate Borrowing”
• Harold Mulherin; Claremont: “How Firms are Sold”
• Russ Wermers; Maryland: “Is Money Really Smart? New Evidence on the Relation Between Mutual Fund Flows, Manager Behavior, and Performance Persistence”
• Li-Anne Woo and Dave Michayluk; Bond University: “News Releases When Markets are Closed”
• Paul Bennett and Li Wei: “NYSE, Market Fragmentation & Market Quality”
• Jay Wang; University of Michigan: “Dividend Commitment and Discount Management: The Distribution Policy of Closed-End Funds”
• Mila Getmansky; MIT: “The Life Cycle of Hedge Funds: Fund Flows, Size and Performance”
• Debarshi Nandy; Boston College: “How is Value Created in Spin-offs? A Look Inside the Black Box”
• Swami Kalpathy; Arizona State University: “Six-and-one Option Exchanges and Alignment of Equity Incentives”